Abbey Mei Otis on the Weekly Reader & in Locus

Mon 2 Jul 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Posted by: Gavin

Alien Virus Love Disaster cover - click to view full sizeIn the run up to the publication of Abbey Mei Otis’s debut Alien Virus Love Disaster Abbey is interviewed this week by Dakota VanLinden on KMSU’s Weekly Reader.

And the collection gets a lovely big review by Gary K. Wolfe in Locus:

‘‘Not an Alien Story’’ says, ‘‘Things aren’t going to change. We aren’t going to get jobs. Animals aren’t going to pad through our dreams and whisper the answers.’’ Sometimes Otis can toss off a classic Kelly Link-style sentence (‘‘She was so rich the stories came true as she spoke them’’), sometimes an almost pulp-like opening hook (‘‘Can’t remember if I was nine or ten when the sex robot fell from the sky’’), sometimes a sharp apothegm about the appeal of VR (‘‘It’s not that planet calling you. It’s this one pushing you away’’). If Otis’s overall vision seems pretty dark, it’s ameliorated by the colorful voices and deeply humane characters struggling in a world that offers them plenty of bizarre experiences, but little real hope. It’s a world far more like ours than we’d want to believe, but it also a world not quite like anyone else’s. At their best, the stories in Alien Virus Love Disaster can generate the same sort of excitement of first coming across writers as diverse as Kelly Link, M. Rickert, or Margo Lanagan: a striking new voice, both strangely familiar and yet disorienting, that takes us somewhere we haven’t been.